Essentially yes. Companies paid the tariff costs, largely passed this on to consumers via higher prices, and now companies are due the tariff costs back. Consumers of course won’t get anything back.

Well done America.

I don’t think LLMs contradict the Pinker description - it just turns out that the output stream embodies a lot of information, and you can construct a model (of some reasonable fidelity) of the original sources from sufficient examples of the output stream.

I responded to a comment that called progressive taxation a crazy “far left” idea - I’m not sure the second and third order details of taxation policy are really relevant here…

But ok - yes, sure, in real life it’s a mix and the mix is worth debating. Note also that consumption taxes often have exemptions/reductions to offset the most severe regressive effects.

It’s very, very basic economics - the marginal utility of money decreases, so progressive taxation is better than regressive taxation.

On point 2 - notice how flat your graph is for the last 6k years?

Also, why do you think the impact of past changes on a tiny group of humans living as hunter gatherers is of any relevance to 8 billion people living in the modern world (including, for example, in massive coastal cities?)